05 Dec 08 Measuring the value of point of view
Perhaps it is acceptable to be satisfied with today’s typical web metrics – page views, visits, conversion, even engagement in its many forms. They give us an idea of who is visiting, what they are doing and give some measure of the pulse of a community. These metrics can reveal informative trends – they certainly can alert us when something is wrong! However, I am not convinced that they show us when things are right.
As I have written here recently, I believe that the Internet’s world-transforming power arises from the incredibly low cost of sharing of points of view. Digitization and network have created information overload and now we get to figure out how to cope with the explosion by packaging and distributing points of view about which information matters.
The Internet arrived in a world where the vast majority of people received the vast majority of their information about the world beyond their immediate experience from advertising-based media, a highly consolidated industry that presented essentially one homogenized point of view – whatever attracted the most eyeballs.
Don’t misunderstand – I’m not arguing that everybody wants to see everybody else’s point of view. Some people aren’t even opinion leaders in their own homes! My argument is that even a relatively small increase in the number of available viewpoints can have a profound impact, especially when thinking is as homogenized as big media tends to be. If you don’t see this happening in today’s world, you aren’t paying attention.
So how do we measure the value of point of view? Start with the assumption that in any community, whether as tightly knit as a private mailing list or as wild and wide open as Facebook and Twitter, there are opinion leaders, people who have more influence than the rest. Figure out who they are by how often and how much others respond to them. Ultimately, I think that line of thinking leads to the idea of memes, ideas that move through community from one person to another. If there is a holy grail in social media analytics, I think it lies in our ability to track memes – in the commercial sphere, ideas about products, companies, brands and so forth – as they move through social media space, regardless of technological boundaries. Most of my work for the last eight years, starting with Opion (whose name came from a misspelling of “opinion” at a brainstorming session; now part of A.C. Nielsen), has been pointed in that direction, tempered by what is possible and what can be funded.
Tags: media, memes, point of view, web analytics
